The folks at Telltale Games had a daunting task in bringing this adventure game to the WiiWare service. The PC version is around 200 megs, and presumes you have at least reasonably modern hardware. The Wii is nowhere near as powerful as most current PCs, and WiiWare downloads max out somewhere around 40 megs... so something had to give. Fortunately, it wasn’t the core gameplay or humor that got scaled back, but rather the graphics and sound. The end result is a game that is still quite fun and good at making you laugh, and it even picks up improved controls in the process.
For those not familiar with the series, Tales of Monkey Island is a set of ’episodic games’; each installment costs 1000 Wii Points (roughly $10 US) and offers about three to five hours of gameplay, consisting of guiding a bumbling but good-natured pirate named Guybrush Threepwood through all sorts of logic puzzles. This first episode starts on a high note, with Guybrush confronting his rival, the ghost pirate LeChuck. After a few tutorial puzzles, Guybrush finds his hand infected by LeChuck’s... soul? Evil energy? Something like that, and not long after that Guybrush winds up on an island where the inward winds prevent him from escaping. It’s up to you to explore, talk to a cast of colorful characters, and solve various problems in order to get Guybrush off Flotsam Island and back to dealing with LeChuck.
The core gameplay is pretty typical of adventure games; you talk to people to pick up clues about what problems they’re facing, and use a variety of items lying around to solve them. Most of these puzzles are reasonably intuitive or can be figured out with due persistence, though a few may leave you baffled; thankfully plenty of walkthroughs exist online to nudge you in the right direction. Fans of the original Monkey Island games will be pleased to see this one lives up to their name, with plenty of familiar characters, homages to situations from previous titles ("look, a three-headed monkey!", etc.), and recognizable music. And the controls work out a lot better on the Wii; the disappointing ’drag click’ system for moving around on the PC is replaced by Wiimote plus Nunchuk controls, so you use the analog stick to move Guybrush around and this works so much better.
That said, hardware limitations have forced Telltale to make some serious compromises with this game’s sound and graphics. Everything from the PC version is here, but is in reduced quality and the loading times are higher. Voice acting now has a slight scratchy sound associated with a loss in quality, and the visuals wildly alternate between being just fine and having serious framerate drops. It never becomes unplayable, but it regularly is less than smooth. It says a lot in this game’s favor that its humor is so well done that it overcomes these problems, making it worth playing.
Do I recommend Tales of Monkey Island Episode 1 for purchase? Yes, but with some conditions. Both the PC version and this one are hilarious and offer good value for the money, and both can easily be described as fun games. The problem is that the WiiWare version is forced to make lots of technical compromises just to exist on this system. The graphics and framerate take an obvious hit, the sound is noticably lower quality (but still tolerable), and there is no ’season package deal’ for the Wii version. The difference between $9 for a single PC episode and 1000 Wii Points is not much, but PC users can pick up a package deal of five episodes for $35; Wii users must buy all five separately, paying about $50 in the end for a weaker version of the game.
Thus, my advice is this: If you have a reasonably current PC that can play Windows games decently, go with the PC version. If your PC is very old (or you’re reading this review through some other means because you don’t have a computer), then the WiiWare version is certainly acceptable and worth your money.
